Desejo mimético e imitação nas redes sociais digitais

• Autor(a) principal: Rosa, António Machuco
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Livro
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://hdl.handle.net/10216/131776
• topic: Ciências da comunicação; Communication sciences

In this talk we analyse the structure and underlying dynamic process of some digital social networks, using the framework provided by René Girard's concept of mimetic desire and by network theory. We show how social networks are a space of public display designed to attract the desire of others, and how they generate cascades of imitation from individual to individual. The networks are doubly mimetic. Networks such as YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram are programmed to create and intensify mimetic intersubjective desire and the contagion of imitation. In this presentation, we first discuss some basic concepts of network theory, emphasizing the importance of the distribution function of links in a network, namely the existence of power laws. We then show how mimetic desire is at the origin of this kind of mathematical function and how mimetic desire is also responsible for well-documented phenomena such as the existence of filters bubbles and echo chambers in social networks. In this regard, we point to the structure of the algorithms that classify the visibility and popularity of pages, e.g. Edge Rank on Facebook, as amplifiers of mimetic desire, since they are based on the principle that "popularity attracts popularity". We conclude by a general discussion of how digital social networks have profoundly shifted from the original intentions that led to the creation of the Internet and the World Wide Web.